The ‘summer of migration’ has ended. While numerous initiatives still support the ‘new citizens’, through organising day-to-day support, festivals, language courses and much more, the political class wants to invert this dynamic: they try to erect new borders, enforce deterioration of social standards and to use the refugees to politically divide the working class – as a catalyst for a very far-reaching social re-formation.

Within the political left, views on this development can be divided roughly into two sorts: some conceptualise the impressive self-organisation of refugees and the tearing down of border fences as ‘autonomy of migration’. Others see Merkel’s policies from a solely functionalist perspective: migration is beneficial for capital’s interest in cheap, qualified and motivated labour power and in additional contribution payers for the pension funds.

In reality these two aspects come together. By migrating towards the northern European centres many people try to become active subjects again. Capital wants to make use of their social energy for the restructuring of labour markets and to put pressure on local class relations. Furthermore, mass migration can have similar effects, like an economic stimulus program, by creating employment in job centres, in teaching, in construction, in the welfare and security sectors… in addition it lowers the reproduction costs of labour power (maintenance and education of a human being during the first two decades of their life costs around 200,000 Euro – Germany is a country of ‘old age’ and desperately needs young people!).

To have this impact proletarian migration must be controlled, something which those in power have increasingly been unable to do in recent years. The most recent stages of this loss of control were the escalation of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece in early 2015, the demolition of the border fences in Turkey in Mid-July 2015 in the aftermath of the fights over Tal Abjad in Syria and finally the trek of refugees from the main station in Budapest towards the Austrian border. In early September the arriving refugees were welcomed with applause in Vienna, Munich and other cities. Apart from the actual border-crisis, this reaction of the local population is the second aspect of the state’s loss of control and would have been unthinkable in the early 1990s. Thirdly, the ruling class has no strategy of how to ‘fight the underlying reasons for migration’. In fact, the opposite is true: the ever more brutal and destructive repression of oppositional movements in an increasing number of regions around the globe aggravates the social antagonism; crisis and wars result in the collapse of entire regions.

The about-turn of the Merkel government in summer was both an acknowledgement of this reality and an effort to re-claim control. The proclamation of a ‘culture of welcoming’ is part and parcel of this effort. Only by transforming the patient long-term work of refugee initiatives into a public event would the political class subsequently be able to invert it.

In the following we want to elaborate on the relation between the migration of refugees and labour migration into Germany within the European context. Initially, the distinction between ‘refugees’ and ‘labour migrants’ was a purely legal one: Greek workers who escaped the military junta and came to Germany in 1967 were categorised as ‘guest workers’. After the official recruitment ban of 1973, Turkish workers, who were trying to escape from the military coup in 1980, had to claim asylum. Senegalese migrants who risked their lives while crossing the Mediterranean were treated as illegal agriculture workers in Spain and as asylum seekers in Germany.

Hail, Caesar! Communists, Jews, and Queers all play a role in the movie of capital. The division of labor that characterizes modern societies of production is reflected in the division of the Godhead, the division of the movie business, the division of man. Absolute Spirit in the form of Religion (Christianity), Art (Film), and Philosophy (Communism) are the three ideological systems that struggle for supremacy, with art and religion uniting under the sign of economy (not money!) to overcome the threat of communism as the sexually deviant force which could disrupt the Production of Capitol (pictures). The genres of film types (Western, Musical, Melodrama, Epic) mimics the jobs of life, in which each actor is but a proletarian sacrificing themselves to the God who cannot be seen–the christ, the boss, the economy. The meta-genre of Hollywood is noir, which uses and abuses workers, women, and the law to reproduce the illusion of stability, family, and morality in a world of bombs, homosexuality, and class struggle. Superseding theology and dialectics, the true unity of man lies in accepting his own internal divisions, in which faith is faithless, and the essence of the good is nothing other than the light of the image itself.

Youth: Old men, young women. Disgusting.

Anomalisa: The emotional sublime penetrates the ice of bourgeois social relations in the form of a human connection.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The old regime and peasant class survive the transition to capitalism in the English countryside as the Undead, returning in the form of the repressed side of primitive accumulation. Patriarchy eats brains as feminism emerges within the shell of the old world.

How to be single: Modern Dating Movie.

Zoolander 2: Metrosexual Identity Crisis of the middle-aged man.

Race: Black Proletarian vs. Aryan Slave-Masters can only end in AMERICA.

Gods of Egypt: White people play Egyptians in this non-allegory of the Arab Spring.

Political conversions are painful, like losing your religion or falling out of love.

The biggest story of the past fifty years in American politics has been the ascendancy of the right, and it’s a story of apostasy. At each stage of the conservative movement’s long march to power, crucial aid was provided by heretics from the left. Progressives recoiled from the New Deal and turned reactionary; ex-Communists helped to launch National Review, in the nineteen-fifties; recovering socialists founded neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies; New Left radicals turned on their former comrades and former selves in the Reagan years. Ronald Reagan, whose Presidency brought the movement to its high-water mark, was himself once a New Deal liberal. In the course of a lifetime, the prevailing political winds are westerly—they blow from left to right. Try to think of public figures who made the opposite journey: Elizabeth Warren, Garry Wills, and Joan Didion come to mind, and Kevin Phillips, the disillusioned Nixon strategist; more recently, the writer Michael Lind and the Clinton-hater-turned-lover David Brock defected from the right to the left. That’s about it.

The most common explanation is the one variously attributed to Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George: “Any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head.” The move rightward is thus a sign of the hard wisdom that comes with age and experience—or, perhaps, the callousness and curdled dreams that accompany stability and success. Irving Kristol, the ex-Trotskyist who became the godfather of neoconservatism, quipped that a neoconservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Most people are hardly aware of the shift until it’s exposed by a crisis, like a major political realignment that forces us to cross party lines. Even then, they want to believe that it’s the politics, not themselves, that changed. My maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, an Alabama congressman in the early decades of the twentieth century, began his career voting with the only Socialist in Congress and ended as a bitter opponent of what he saw as the federal overreach of the New Deal. In 1935, on the floor of the House, a Democratic colleague mocked him for reversing his position on public ownership of electric power. Fuming, Huddleston insisted, “My principles and myself remain unchanged—it is the definition of ‘liberalism’ which has been changed.” Or, as Reagan famously (and falsely) claimed, he didn’t leave the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party left him.

It’s like blaming your spouse for your own unfaithfulness. Political conversions are painful affairs, as hard to face up to as falling out of love or losing your religion. Or maybe harder. Religious faith, being beyond the reach of reason, doesn’t have to answer gotcha questions about a previously held position. There’s a special contempt reserved for the political apostate—an accusation of intellectual collapse, an odor of betrayal. When you switch sides, you have to find new friends. Political identities are shaped mainly by factors that have nothing to do with rational deliberation: family and tribal origins, character traits, historical currents. In “Partisan Hearts and Minds,” published in 2002, three political scientists made an empirical case that political affiliations form in early adulthood and seldom change. Few people can be reasoned into abandoning their politics.

The current hard times have been harder on some people than on others, harder on the poor—obviously—than on the rich; but harder also on blacks and Hispanics than on whites. As of this writing, the unemployment rate for blacks is at 15.6 percent, and for Hispanics it’s at 12.7 percent. For white people, it’s 9.3 percent. 1

Of course, the vast majority of the unemployed are white. But it’s the disparity in rates, not in absolute numbers, that tends to get foregrounded, since that disparity functions not only as a measure of suffering but also, in William A. Garity’s concise summary, as “an index of discrimination in our society.” 2

And it’s the ongoing fact of discrimination that motivates our ongoing interest in identity politics. As long as inequality is apportioned by identity, we will be concerned with identity.

This is obviously both inevitable and appropriate. But it is also—and almost as obviously—irrelevant to a left politics, or even to the goal of reducing unemployment, as we can see just by imagining what it would be like if we finally did manage to get rid of discrimination. Suppose, for example, that unemployment for whites and for Asian-Americans were to rise to 10 percent while for blacks and Hispanics it fell to 10 percent. Or suppose that unemployment for everyone went to 15 percent. In both cases, we would have eliminated the racial disparity in unemployment rates, but in neither case would we have eliminated any unemployment. And we don’t even need hypotheticals to make the point. About three quarters of the job losers in the current recession have been men, which means that the numbers of men and women in the workforce are now roughly equal. So, from the standpoint of gender equity, the recession has actually been a good thing. It’s as if, unable to create more jobs for women, we’d hit upon the strategy of eliminating lots of the jobs for men—another victory for feminism and for anti-discrimination since, from the standpoint of anti-discrimination, the question of how many people are unemployed is completely irrelevant. What matters is only that, however many there are, their unemployment is properly proportioned.

His research interests include modern European intellectual history; social theory, especially critical theories of modernity; twentieth-century Germany; anti-Semitism;[1] and contemporary global transformations. He is co-editor with Craig Calhoun and Edward LiPuma of Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives and author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. He is also co-editor with Eric Santner of Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, a collection of essays that consider the meaning of the holocaust in twentieth-century history and its influence on historical practice. Postone’s work has had a large influence on the anti-Germans.

He was originally denied tenure by the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department, sparking a great deal of public resentment from graduate students whom he had been involved in teaching. He was later granted tenure by the History Department.

Today Moishe Postone is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History and co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

Capitalism as a historical specificity

An heterodox marxist

In 1978 Postone started a critical analysis on Marx’s theory of value.[2] But Moishe Postone’s most distinguished main work, ‘Time, Labor and Social Domination’, was published in 1993 (translated into French in 2009 and Japanese in 2012).

In his works he proposes a fundamental reinterpretation of Karl Marx‘s critique of political economy, focusing on Marx’s original concepts value, capital and labour. Inspired by heterodox Marxist thinkers such as Isaak Rubin, Roman Rosdolsky, etc., and certain authors of the Frankfurt School, e.g., Sohn-Rethel, who remained marginal to that school, he shows that the assumptions of the ‘pessimistic turn’ of Horkheimer were historically rather than theoretically founded. Postone interprets critical writings on Marx’s economics, especially in its Capital 1 edition, and Grundrisse, as the development of a social-mediational theory of value.

Marx’s Capital: a critic immanent to its purpose

Postone thinks that in writing the ‘Grundrisse‘ Marx concludes that adequate critical theory must be completely immanent to its purpose. The criticism cannot be taken from a point of view external to its object, but must appear in the mode of presentation itself. Das Kapital is so structured, for Postone, with a surface level immanent to political economics discourse and a deeper layer which comes through later, which makes it particularly difficult to interpret. Indeed, precisely because of the inherent nature of the format Marx uses, the object of the critique of Marx has often been taken as the standpoint of this criticism. For example, not only is the categories of exchange valuehistorically specific to the capitalist period, but also value’s basis, the capitalist form of wage labour, must also be historically specific, and does not apply conceptually to other periods. The methodological sections of the Grundrisse clarify therefore not only Marx’s presentation, but other sections make explicit that the categories of capital such as value and exchange-labour, are historically specific to the capitalist social formation. The so-called labour theory of value is not a theory of the material wealth created by labor but is in a parallel manner also seen when looked at transhistorically as “human metabolism with nature.” Precisely because it is not structured immanently, the ‘Grundrisse’ provides a key to read Capital. This is the key to the reinterpretation of the work of mature Marx, with which Postone works.

That problem of replacing politics with public therapy endures to this day, and it flourishes in a context where social media linkages surrogate other historical forms of social interchange and collective action. Antiracist liberalism thrives in a context where the performance of self-loathing, outrage, and concern are easily traded public currency, instead of the more socially costly politics of public sacrifice and the redistribution of societal resources.

Far-left activists in Berlin warned on Sunday that they would exact €1m in revenge in revenge for any police raids on their squats and other ‘projects’ in the capital, after dozens of cars were burned at the weekend.

On Friday and Saturday nights, dozens of cars were destroyed and damaged in the capital by hooded attackers, none of whom were arrested.

A claim of responsibility posted online on Sunday seemed to confirm city interior senator Frank Henkel’s belief that “left-wing slobs” were behind the attacks, with the authors saying they would cause €1m of property damage for attacks on left-wing ‘projects’ in Berlin.

Police reported that between 20 and 40 masked people on bicycles had burned four high-value cars and damaged 24 others on Friday night around the Gleisdreieck park in the south-central Kreuzberg district.

Late on Saturday, a similar incident occurred, with witnesses reporting a crowd of between 50 and 100 masked perpetrators damaging around 20 cars.

More cars burned over the weekend in the Charlottenburg and Gesundbrunnen districts.

“Away from the Sink” appeared in Kosmoprolet #4, an attempt by The Friends of the Classless Society to bring together some thoughts on the relationship between gender differences and the domination of capital. This text has recently been extensively criticized by The Friends of Genderless society in their essay, “Right in the Sink: Capitalism and the Gender Binary.” Both texts are presented below in German.

The recent announcement of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) that it would introduce a negative interest rate (NIRP) for commercial banks holding cash reserves is the final admission that monetary policy supported by mainstream economics and implemented by central banks globally has failed.

The main economic policy weapon used since the global financial crash and the ensuing Great Recession to avoid another Great Depression of the 1930s has been zero interest rates (ZIRP), then ‘unconventional’ monetary measures or ‘quantitative easing (QE)’ (increasing the quantity of money supply to banks), all fixed to inflation targets of 2% a year or so. ZIRP and a virtually unlimited supply of cash (QE) were supposed to kick-start the global economy into action, so that eventually capitalism and market forces would take over and achieve ‘normal’ and sustained economic growth and fuller employment.

Endnotes – If the term “communisation” is missing from Endnotes 4 this is due partly to the topics we covered, and partly to our frustration with the way this word has become associated with a new theoretical brand and/or radical identity. We will return to the theme of communism in the present tense in Endnotes 5, but as a preview of that issue we here publish a critical take on “communisation” by some friends of ours and the classless society (Freundinnen und Freunden der klassenlosen Gesellschaft). We don’t agree with it all, and we will include a response in the forthcoming issue, but in the meantime we hope it will provide food for thought. This text was originally published in the Friends’ journal Kosmoprolet as a response to Théorie Communiste’s critique of the Friends’ 28 Theses on Class Society. A translation of TC’s original critique can be found here.